Kanye West: Ye clashes with Piers Morgan in new interview, admits antisemitic comments caused ‘hurt’

Tesla billionaire and potential Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to be teasing a potential business collaboration with Kanye West, despite the rapper’s recent anti-Semitic rants and attacks on George Floyd.

On Monday, Mr Musk shared an image playing on the Dragon Ball anime series, where two characters can fuse together into a more powerful being by touching fingers.

In his version, the Tesla founder is edited onto one character, along with a Twitter logo, while Ye’s face is superimposed onto another, with the logo of Parler, the right-wing social network Mr West recently purchased.

“Fun times ahead!” Mr Musk wrote below the image.

We’re following this breaking news story.

Kanye West has always been known for being provocative and unpredictable, but few could’ve guessed how quickly his stance on George Floyd changed in recent years.

Last week, the rapper and fashion designer, now known as Ye, appeared on the Drink Champs podcast, where he made numerous anti-Semitic remarks and cited a documentary from right-wing figure Candace Owens as proof that the police hadn’t actually killed George Floyd.

“The guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that,” West said, even though both video evidence plainly shows, and medical officials and courts later confirmed, that police were the ones who killed Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

The acrimony between West and the Floyd family is all the more shocking, considering just two years ago the rapper was a major public ally.

He was one of many public figures who joined in the 2020 racial justice protests that followed Floyd’s killing.

That same year, West also donated $2m to the families of victims of racial violence including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and the Floyds. The rapper set aside an undisclosed amount of money to be put towards college tuition for Gianna Floyd, George’s daughter. More details in our full story.

Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West spoke on Monday as the pair face similar but unrelated accusations of antisemitism for their recent remarks about Jewish people.

The two spoke over the phone after it was announced that the Grammy-winning yet troubled and controversial artist would purchase Parler, a right-wing social media site, according to Politico, which cited a source familiar with the call.

Mr West apparently initiated the conversation and the two plan to meet in person for dinner in the near future, according to the news outlet. The rapper was banned from Twitter and Instagram after threatening to go “death con 3 on Jewish people” and alleging that Jews are behind his wife Kim Kardashian’s choice to divorce him.

The former president, meanwhile, faces his own brewing anger from Jewish Americans over a statement he released in recent days blaming those same Jews for not being grateful for the US’s support of Israel and demanding that they “get their act together” and support him in greater numbers.

John Bowden has the full story.

Kanye West’s recent antisemitic rants may have gotten him locked out his social media accounts, and condemned by a variety of people, but that hasn’t stopped TikTok users from flocking to his hateful comments and even mixing it with literal Nazi propaganda.

The content violates TikTok’s speech guidelines, which state, “We do not permit content that contains hate speech or involves hateful behavior, and we remove it from our platform.”

However, as Rolling Stone reports, the hateful videos remain on the site for now.

ICYMI: On the heels of having his Instagram restricted after sharing anti-Semitic posts, Kanye West has now violated Twitter’s rules with an anti-Semitic tweet that’s since been removed and promtped calls to “permanently ban” him from the platform.

He’s also been locked from using the platform.

Late on Saturday night, Mr West shared a tweet that declared he was going to go “death con 3” on Jewish people and alleged that he wasn’t “Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew.” The tweet was removed by Twitter and replaced with text that said it violated the Twitter Rules, linking back to the company’s platform use guidelines.

Jenna Amatulli has more.

Observers are alarmed at the increasing trend of right-leaning businessmen buying up social networks, from Kanye West buying Parler, to Peter Thiel funding Rumble, to Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

“It’s never been about free speech,” advocacy group Public Citizen said in a tweet on Monday. “It’s about power. It’s about control. It’s about evading accountability.”

Here’s what critics have said about the direction Mr Musk could take Twitter.

Kanye West has “betrayed” the Floyd family by making false allegations about George Floyd.

The controversial rapper appeared on a podcast last week and claimed the Minneapolis man died from drug use, when video evidence, expert testimony, and legal holdings have all concluded that Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020.

Here’s our reporting on what actually happened to Mr Floyd.

During a high-profile recent appearance on Fox News, Kanye West made a number of antisemitic remarks that were edited out of the final broadcast, according to leaked videos.

Now, leaders at the network are “full-on freaked out” and hunting for the “mole” who shared the clips with the media, The Daily Beast reports.

The conservative network is known to clamp down on leakers, firing Bill O’Reilly associate producer within 24 hours of a 2012 leak.

“This new leaker learned from my mistakes,” Mr Muto told The Daily Beast. “The main reason I got caught is that I wasn’t covering my digital trail particularly well. They’re obviously doing a better job than I did if they haven’t been found yet.”

Other than, apparently, Elon Musk, Kanye West’s recent string of antisemitic rants and attacks on George Floyd have been met with universal outrage.

As The Independent’s Noah Berlatsky argued in our Voices section, Ye’s “bigotry” is a sign of the current, deeply hateful era of conservative politics, one that “shows that antisemitism is central to, and an inevitable consequence of, the GOP’s embrace of a politics of division and intolerance.”

In The Washington Post, Damon Young noted how for all of Ye’s claims to be a revolutionary provocateur, there’s actually nothing revolutionary about siding with reactionary forces and glomming onto hate that’s lurked in our culture for centuries.

Mr West’s views are “so rote, so common, so boring.”

“There’s nothing radical about anti-Blackness and nothing subversive about misogyny,” he adds. “Antisemitism is literally thousands of years old.”

Meanwhile, in Buzzfeed, Elamin Abdelmahmoud argues that Ye intentionally fomenting outrage just to get attention and enrich himself.

“West is no longer an entertainer but a multi-industry business with one clear marketing strategy: provoke Black people, aimlessly and without ends, for the purposes of directing attention toward the newest product,” he writes. “With the White Lives Matter stunt, West is once again manipulating Black rage and Black pain and using that momentum in the service of Ye Inc.”

“This is not a fluke,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes argued during a Monday monologue on his show All In.

The host said that the recent antisemitism controversies around Donald Trump and Kanye West are a reminder that right-wing politics always find a way to attack pluralism and tolerance, a strategy that all but “inevitably” results in people attacking Jews, given the deep history of antisemitism in the US and beyond.

“Right-wing politics as currently embodied by MAGAism—which is the dominant ethos of one of two of America’s major parties—has always been and will always be fundamentally a threat to tolerance and pluralism that will inevitably target Jews,” Mr Hayes said.

Here’s more of his monologue.